They’d already experienced a few Hurricanes before this point, but here comes another
one, and the five little boats get all separated. De Vaca’s boat and another shipwrecked
on what they came to label ‘Malhado’: the ‘Isle of Ill Fate’ or ‘Doom’.
With only De Vaca and about 40 other Spaniards left, they attempt to go to sea again,
naked - using their clothes to plug holes in their boat, but no sooner did they embark
than a big wave rose up from nowhere and claimed their transport and they had to swim
back ashore. With few survival skills and little knowledge of what to eat and what not
to, they’re now essentially at the mercy of the Native Americans.
So De Vaca continues South - his party members mostly dead or dispersed - keeping up
with the Indians in their seasonal travels, and being stuck in one area for several seasons before continuing. At times, he has to let himself be enslaved by various Tribes or
Bands of Indians in order to survive. Some Indians were good to him and others were
cruel, and he was beaten and abused. He becomes a trader at one point - trading flint
rock that the Indians needed to make arrowheads.
He eventually enters an area where he talks about eating acorns and smouldering leaves
to keep the mosquitoes away. He also talks about feasting on oysters before entering a
place south of there where they ate prickly pears exclusively for the next three months.
“...eating nothing else.”, De Vaca said.
After 10 years of starvation and hardship, De Vaca makes it to Mexico (there are 3 other
survivors), and later he wrote this about the natives he’d encountered: “But when it
pleased God our Lord to take us to those Indians, they respected us and held us precious,
as the former had done, and even a little more, at which we were not a little astonished,
while it clearly shows how, in order to bring those people to Christianity and obedience
unto Your Imperial Majesty, they should be well treated, and not otherwise.”
LORE: CABEZA DE VACA
His surname, ‘Cabeza de Vaca’, means ‘Head
of a Cow’, which was granted to his mother’s
family back in the 1200’s, because of his ancestor Martín Alhaja, for aiding the Christian Army,
who were attacking the Moors, by leaving a
cow’s head as a marker next to a secret mountain
pass that the Army could use.
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